The senator also told a good story about the young Lyndon Johnson with a shoebox full of fake votes, though not quite enough as it turned out, since his opponent had more. Paul could have mentioned that Johnson had the sarcastic nickname “Landslide Lyndon” in Texas and beyond because of his later election fraud that succeeded in grabbing his first Senate seat which is known as the Box 13 Scandal.
As it happens, voter fraud is rather common. The Heritage Foundation has compiled a database of over 1300 cases which illustrate the energy and ingenuity which some apply to cheating their way into office.
Finally, Senator Paul blows the whistle on the mask obsession. The media has convinced people that masks are the magic prevention against getting sick, and anyone not wearing one is an enemy of society. He considers it “malpractice” for TV doctors to recommend a medical strategy that doesn’t work.
]]>MARIA BARTIROMO: Joining me right now is Kentucky Senator, member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rand Paul. Senator, it’s great to see you this morning. Thanks very much for being here. You were at that hearing yesterday. Take us behind the closed doors — what did you take away from that?
PAUL: I would say it was one of the most exciting hearings I’ve been to in years. It was explosive; there was raw emotion on both sides, but there is a serious point here, and I think if you want less fraud in our elections you want the elections to be legitimate and considered to be legitimate, you have to punish those who committed fraud. So 1500 people were ineligible to vote because they were deceased in Nevada — whoever did that needs to go to jail. 4,000 illegal aliens voted — they need to not be allowed to vote but whoever allowed it to happen needs to go to jail. it needs to be fixed so we really do have a lot of work to try to make sure our elections are legitimate.
This is not new. I remember the famous story about LBJ. It’s midnight, and he’s got a scotch in one hand, he’s got his illegal votes in a shoebox in the other, and he turns them in at midnight saying, “We’ve won we can turn in our illegal votes and we’ve got just enough,” but then his opponent turns his illegal votes in at two in the morning and LBJ vowed that night never to turn his illegal votes in until the other guy had already turned his in, and so we have a history of cheating in our country. In my state a guy named Pritchard who is part of the kitchen cabinet for FDR went to jail, but if you don’t put people in jail for stuffing the ballot box then you will get more of it.
So yeah, I think the hearing was important and just the beginning. The problem we have in our country is courts don’t like to hear this stuff during elections and right after elections. The history is bad. My dad had an election stolen in 1976, and the courts would never give us justice and never listened to the facts. They kept doing what they’re doing to President Trump which is throwing the cases out based on procedural technicalities but not on the facts.
BARTIROMO: Well I mean these are facts that everybody on each side of the aisle should want spotlighted. I mean you just spotlighted at least three cases of fraud. Why wouldn’t everybody want to ensure that there’s confidence in our election? The same thing is happening I feel like on the intelligence assessment. John Ratcliffe, the DNI, wants to come out with this intelligence assessment. It’s due tomorrow on Friday and he’s not going to sign on to it unless there’s a fair debate about what China did and whether or not there was Chinese interference in this election. We know that the pandemic changed everything. Here’s the DNI on this program telling us about the pandemic’s impact, not just about killing hundreds of thousands of people in America, but what it did to our election. Take a listen:
JOHN RATCLIFFE: Here in the United States, the pandemic influenced a lot about how people voted but also how they had to vote. As a result of the pandemic we saw state legislatures as little as 90 days before the election adopting new voting procedures. Essentially we had universal mail-in balloting across this country in a way that we hadn’t seen before. To that point, almost 73 percent of the American people this year voted before election day, a good percentage of those by mail. That’s about an 80 percent increase over anything we’ve ever seen before, so it’s little wonder that we see what’s happening around the country as a result of that with mail-in balloting and all of the questions and the questions that are being raised in lawsuits and by everyday Americans about what happened in the election.
BARTIROMO: Senator, shouldn’t we all agree on all sides of the aisle that there was a serious situation with China and that upset our vote?
PAUL: Well I think the democrats for a long time have wanted mail-in voting. it’s much easier to solicit votes that way from people who don’t traditionally vote and are lacking in a lot of information about the country, but it’s a way for them to expand to that vote that is typically democrat. But I think they purposely used the pandemic to transform our elections and in many ways, not only was it illegal as far as non-citizens or people voting twice, but also the election law was changed by people who have no constitutional right to change it — secretaries of states, governors change the law without the permission of the legislature. So yes, we have to do something about that, and that is a legal question, and I think the courts have gotten it wrong so far, and the courts haven’t even really listened to the argument they just dismissed these cases, but the idea that a secretary of state can change election law without the legislature passing that is completely against every tenet of a state constitution as well as the federal constitution.
BARTIROMO: Yeah and that was the basis of the Texas lawsuit and the Supreme court wouldn’t even hear it. Senator I want to get to the covered relief story but let me just get your take on the Georgia race. are we going to see the same situation in Georgia on January 5th where there were more ballots than actual people who voted, where there were ballots that weren’t even folded meaning they were never in an envelope, where the envelopes were separated from the ballot so you couldn’t compare the signatures?
PAUL: Well there were 1700 people that we heard voted twice. The Secretary of State needs to prosecute every one of them and deter them from doing it again. Their votes shouldn’t be counted. There are thousands of people who voted for the wrong address in Georgia. those people need to be taken out of the system and they need to either re-register from a legal address or be prevented from voting from an illegal address. I don’t know if they’re doing any of that, and probably most importantly they’re mailing out a solicitation; they’re mailing everybody out a solicitation to vote by mail, and this is not in the state law, this is something that has been created out of whole cloth by the secretary of state. But if they do it again yes i’m very very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters that you will affect and change the outcomes. I’m very worried that democrats will control all three branches of government, and they really truly will transform America but not for the better.
BARTIROMO Wow, that is extraordinary. If there is not policing in place in Georgia I don’t know what to say. Let’s talk about this closing in on the covid relief and government funding, Senator, the bipartisan $900 billion stimulus package apparently on the table. it includes individual checks around six to seven hundred dollars a person. No state and local or business liability protection is included in this bill. Negotiators are close to an agreement on a $1.4 trillion spending package to avoid a government shutdown on Friday at midnight. What can you tell us about all of this, Senator? Where are we? Do you support these things?
PAUL: The one thing you typically get compromise around here for is spending money we don’t have. Last year we spent 3.3 trillion we didn’t have; we had to borrow this year this new package and I suspect it will pass. It’ll be $2 trillion more in additional debt, so it’s a problem. I don’t think this much debt is good for a country. We’re up to 138 percent of our GDP with our debt, so there’s a real problem where we are, and there’s going to be a day of reckoning. I don’t support it.
I think the way that the economy opens up and the way the economy can recover is simply by opening up again. There’s no science to keeping schools closed. There’s actually no good science that keeping the restaurants closed is doing this. In fact there’s no real science that anything we have done has changed the trajectory of this other than the vaccine.
And so it appalls me when I see these so-called TV doctors on other channels saying, “Oh just wear a mask, you don’t need to get a vaccine, the mask is more important to protect you than the vaccine.” Well 80 percent of the people getting the virus that are positive with the virus have been wearing the mask the whole time. They’ll tell you, “We wear it all the time, and we still got it,” so it is malpractice to tell people the mask is enough to protect you? People should go for a vaccine, absolutely.
BARTIROMO: Yeah and also to say that the science tells us to close down restaurants — where do they get this?
PAUL: It’s arbitrary, it’s capricious and it’s the an example of authoritarianism — that’s why we should never give so much power to one person.
BARTIROMO: Yep, Senator it’s great to see you this morning. Please come back soon.
But over time, the temporary hang out turned into a green card. In 2013, [...]]]>
But over time, the temporary hang out turned into a green card. In 2013, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) introduced the “U Visa Reform Act of 2013,” H.R. 463, but it didn’t go anywhere.
For background, see my 2007 article, Victim Visas—How America Stupidly Rewards Misfortune and Fraud.
Naturally, that sort of law is a serious fraud magnet, such as reported here in a 2013 case where an illegal alien in California arranged to have a fake robbery against her so she could remain in the US as a privileged crime victim.
On Friday, Tucker Carlson noted a rather more grandiose U Visa charade, involving 10 aliens at Bob’s Burgers n’ Teriyakis in SeaTac, Washington.
The good news is the fraud was figured out pretty quickly; the bad news is that Washington is a sanctuary state, so the aliens won’t be deported.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s a story so nuts and unlikely, it can only happen in something like America’s immigration system where crazy things do happen quite a bit.
According to the Sheriff’s Office in King County, Washington — that’s where Seattle is — a group of about 10 immigrants carried out an elaborate fake burglary against themselves, and why did they do that? But one of the many visas that we offer to foreigners is called a non-immigrant visa. It allows a foreigner who was a victim of a crime in the United States to stay in this country for the sake of assisting authorities in solving the crime.
Now, since this crime was fake, of course, the hope was that the case would never be closed and they could stay in this country long term, maybe even forever.
Jason Rantz has been following the story. He’s a Seattle area radio show host and he joins us tonight. So Jason, did I describe that correctly? I mean, you know, it’s almost like out of a movie, this story.
JASON RANTZ: It’s insane and obviously this is a crime that freaked out a whole bunch of people. It happened in SeaTac, it’s right outside of Seattle. We don’t normally see these kinds of robberies, where in this case it was alleged that two men in masks, one with a handgun went into Bob’s Burgers and Teriyaki. It’s this restaurant. They held people up, they tied people up. They sexually assaulted two of the female victims before getting away.
And the story was that some customer wandered in and noticed that this had happened and called 911, and then obviously King County Sheriff’s Deputies took this incredibly seriously. They had a specific description of the two individuals. They had a car and a license plate, and it turns out it was completely a hoax. And they found out pretty quickly that it was a hoax.
And during the investigation they discovered, yes this was, so they thought they would qualify to have a U Visa which says under certain circumstances under certain crimes, you’re protected from being deported because you would have to participate in the actual justice system to go after these bad guys.
Now in theory, when you think you’re not actually going to be deported because there’s not actually a crime, but they think there’s a crime, it means indefinitely they’d be able to stay here.
Now, the ironic part about this story is now that they figured it out, right? They haven’t yet pressed charges, and the expectation is there are going to be some charges. Well, in Washington State, and in King County, and in Seattle, we are sanctuary. We have sanctuary policies, which means even after they are convicted, and let’s say they do some jail time, they’re unlikely to actually be deported anyway, because we will not participate with ICE and we won’t turn them over.
CARLSON: Even though they faked the crime and tied up Seattle area law enforcement trying to solve a crime they that they committed, they won’t be turned over to the Feds for deportation.
RANTZ: They will not be — they can’t be turned over because of our Washington State sanctuary law. It’s absolutely ridiculous and it’s dangerous.
CARLSON: Well, it’s also — it’s masochism, so you can sort of see what’s going on. I mean, there are people who hate our society and are seeking to destroy it obviously.
Jason Rantz, great to see you tonight. Thank you for that — for your explanation.
So now he is back, flacking a book. Harper Collins’ book page headlines, “Whether you were born in the U.S., just recently immigrated, are a Dreamer or undocumented citizen, we are all Americans.”
Obviously, he is still unclear on the concept of American citizenship, just as he was when Time chose him as the magazine’s illegal alien cover boy in 2012:
Jose the Filipino is certainly one of the media’s favorite illegal aliens, since he has no violent crimes to cover up (that we know of), only the ubiquitous job and benefits theft.
Harper Collins also shows a book tour scheduled at least through the end of September, so there is an opportunity for ICE to easily catch and deport him, an action that would be a great service for the nation.
The New York Times apparently remains fond of Vargas, as shown by its review of the book:
Not every day that a writer who happens to be undocumented gets a review in the @nytimesarts section of @nytimes #DearAmerica pic.twitter.com/roC50Bp4rV
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) September 20, 2018
Here’s that review, reprinted elsewhere:
]]>Living the American Dream — in Hiding, New York Times, September 19, 2018
Jose Antonio Vargas comes from a family of gamblers, and in his new book, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” he’s upping the ante — or maybe, given the current executive’s predilection for travel bans and family separations, he’s going all in. Vargas recalls the enormous wager his family made 25 years ago, when his mother brought him to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila and put him on a flight to California. He was 12 years old, and he would go to America first. Mama, as he calls her throughout his memoir, promised to follow.
Twenty-five years later, Mama is still in the Philippines, and Jose is still in the United States — no longer based in Mountain View, Calif., where he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, but traveling around the country as an activist filmmaker and a writer, without a fixed address where he might be apprehended.
In 2011, he was a young journalist with an enviable résumé when he published an essay in The New York Times Magazine that revealed his undocumented status. Immigration lawyers warned him against going public; one called it “legal suicide.” In “Dear America,” Vargas writes that talking to lawyers “made me feel like I was carrying an incurable disease.”
Filipinos living in the United States have a Tagalog term for the undocumented immigrants who go to their churches, live in their communities or reside in their homes: tago ng tago, “hiding and hiding” — T.N.T. for short, like a secret waiting to explode. Vargas’s grandparents, both of them naturalized citizens, expected him to keep hiding until he didn’t have to. The plan was for Jose to find under-the-table work, like cleaning bathrooms at the flea market, so he could save enough money to pay an American woman to marry him. Maybe, his grandmother hoped, he wouldn’t even need to pay anyone, because he would fall in love.
But he wasn’t about to toil in the shadows to marry an American woman; Vargas is gay, and he’s also extremely, exuberantly ambitious. The constant dissembling was unbearable, he explains; he feared losing sight of who he was.
Vargas came out as gay when he was 16. Coming out as undocumented took longer. He wanted to dream big, even when his family was telling him that a life out in the open was not only fanciful but dangerous. “You are not supposed to be here,” his grandfather would remind him.
“The dream that Mama, Lolo and Lola had for me was dictated by their own realities, by their own sense of limitations,” he writes, using the Tagalog words for grandpa and grandma. “The America they dreamed for me was not the America I was creating for myself.”
The moments when Vargas describes how profoundly alienated he feels from his own family are the most candid and crushing parts of the book. He admits that he felt much closer to what he calls his “white family” — the caring grown-ups who mentored him in high school; the seasoned journalists who gave him career advice; the generous benefactors who offered him material support — than to the blood relatives who made extraordinary sacrifices in order to bring him to the United States. As a teenager, he could barely bring himself to call Mama in the Philippines. “I couldn’t talk to my own mother while I was collecting mother figures,” he says, in one ruthlessly honest line.
His grandmother and grandfather raised him, but they couldn’t see him. They warned him against taking up too much space, telling their cub-reporter grandson he was “getting fancy now.” In 2008, when Vargas was cited as part of a team for The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize, his grandmother called to say how worried she was. “What will happen if people find out?” she asked.
“Dear America” covers some of the same ground as Vargas’s essay for The Times Magazine, as well as his 2013 film, “Documented.” He details the fake papers his grandfather purchased for $4,500. He recalls how the local library enabled his teenage self to become a connoisseur of ’90s pop culture on the cheap. (What truly mystified him were the cartoons in The New Yorker: “Were they supposed to be funny?”) He briefly recounts the colonial history of the Philippines, first under the Spanish, then under the Americans, as well as the stark betrayal of the 1946 Rescission Act, which reneged on the American promise to offer citizenship and veterans’ benefits to Filipino soldiers who fought on behalf of the United States in World War II. (Continues)
The basic upshot — when parents break the law, their offspring suffer. What else would you expect?
A 2014 NPR program titled “Who Are The Kids Of The Migrant Crisis?” showed foreign children jumping onto a moving train which is quite dangerous.
It’s reassuring to see that many Americans resist liberal media propaganda.
]]>Voters Blame Parents, Not Feds, For Border Children Crisis, Rasmussen Reports, June 21, 2018
Most voters blame the parents of the separated children at the border for the latest illegal immigration crisis, not the federal government.
When families are arrested and separated after attempting to enter the United States illegally, 54% of Likely U.S. Voters say the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 35% believe the federal government is more to blame for enforcing the law. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
To help understand the current political debate over the children issue, a closer look shows that 82% of Republicans and 56% of voters not affiliated with either major political party feel the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. But 60% of Democrats say the government is more to blame for enforcing the law.
Seventy-five percent (75%) of Democrats think the Trump administration is too aggressive in trying to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, a view shared by only 23% of Republicans and a plurality (46%) of unaffiliated voters.
Among all voters, 49% say the administration is too aggressive trying to stop illegal immigration. Twenty-five percent (25%) say it’s not aggressive enough, while 21% view the administration’s policies as about right.
Fifty-four percent (54%) agree with President Trump when he says, “The United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee-holding facility – it won’t be.” Thirty percent (30%) disagree, while 16% are undecided.
(Continues)
According to voting [...]]]>
According to voting expert Hans von Spakovsky, Trump is right to think that illegal aliens are voting. As the co-author of a book about voter fraud (Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk), he is well versed in the subject.
In a discussion of non-citizen voting, Spakovsky observed, “Based on the surveys it could be anywhere from two percent to over six percent of non-citizens voting in elections which could be anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to over a million.”
Another expert on non-citizen voting is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who will be the co-chair of the Trump commission. Kobach has long been an advocate of photo IDs being used in elections, and Kansas began requiring it in 2012.
Kobach pointed out recently that if there really is no voter fraud as liberals insist, then the commission will report that result and libs should therefore be more supportive of the project.
]]>As Trump creates commission to study voter fraud and suppression, liberals cry foul, By Stephen Dinan and Dave Boyer, Washington Times, May 11, 2017
President Trump established a commission Thursday to study voter fraud and suppression, tapping Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach to lead an effort that is drawing fire even before its first meeting.
On an issue where anecdotes, conjecture and accusations from both sides have dominated the debate, the commission hopes to break new ground by producing a comprehensive national look at the extent of voter fraud.
The commission, for the first time, will delve into Homeland Security databases in an effort to determine the scope of noncitizens who end up illegally registered to vote — and sometimes even cast ballots.
“People have their different opinions about whether this is big enough to be considered a problem, how big a problem is it. But oftentimes they don’t have a whole lot of data to work with. This commission will provide that data,” Mr. Kobach told The Washington Times just after Mr. Trump signed an executive order creating the commission.
The idea for the commission stems from Mr. Trump’s insistence that Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s popular victory last year was padded by illegal votes. Liberal voting rights groups dismissed that, saying there isn’t enough evidence of fraud to give the matter attention.
The commission’s charge is broad and the wording is tempered, but Mr. Trump’s signature ignited ferocious pushback from Democrats and activist groups, who said he was setting the stage to strip voting rights from some Americans.
The ink was barely dry on the executive order before the American Civil Liberties Union said it had filed an open records request demanding that the White House release the evidence Mr. Trump is referencing when he makes claims of fraud.
Dale Ho, ACLU voting rights project director, called on sources to boycott the commission to try to prevent it from completing its work. He called Mr. Kobach “the king of voter suppression” and said his participation makes the commission “a sham.”
Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat, called Mr. Kobach an “enemy of American democracy,” and Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, said Mr. Kobach displays bigotry in his efforts to tighten voting and immigration laws.
The Brennan Center for Justice, another of the advocacy groups, released a report last week surveying election officials in 42 cities and counties and saying that 40 of them reported “no known incidents of noncitizen voting” last year.
Mr. Kobach, though, said there are types of fraud that no local official could identify. A legal immigrant who hasn’t obtained citizenship could have registered, perhaps while at the motor vehicles bureau, and it’s unlikely local elections officials would become aware.
“To make broad statements like ‘It’s not a problem, it doesn’t exist’ — that is factually impossible to do. So what the commission is going to do is provide facts,” he said.
“Their reaction is, ‘Oh no, we don’t want to see facts, we don’t want to see data.’ Well, all we’re going to do is provide data to the public, and people can draw their own conclusions about the numbers,” Mr. Kobach said.
He said it will be tougher to gauge voter suppression, which Democrats say is a bigger problem in elections than fraud.
Mr. Kobach said nonvoting is often the result of several factors and pinning down the one that discourages a person from casting a ballot is tough.
“We’ll see what the commission is able to do, and other people on the commission and people that bring evidence before the commission may bring things that I haven’t anticipated,” he said. “That’s one that’s a really tough nut to crack because it’s hard to say 100 percent that you voted in that election because of these reasons, or you didn’t vote because of that reason.”
He said Kansas has not seen evidence that its photo ID requirement is dissuading voters but other states might have evidence.
Although academics and voting officials have studied voter fraud for years, Mr. Kobach said, they have never been able to take a comprehensive look because they have not had access to important data.
He said the commission will be able to use Homeland Security data that lists every legal immigrant and visa holder in the country — and will run a sample of state voter files against that data to try to spot noncitizens who are registered to vote.
Mr. Kobach said the commission also may tap Social Security’s Death Master File to see how often dead people show up on local voting rolls.
Conservative groups said there are hints of how bad the fraud problem is.
North Carolina’s Board of Elections has identified 41 noncitizens who voted in its election last year, and Nevada has an active investigation. The Washington Times has asked for documents on that probe, but Nevada has delayed its answers.
“Perennial questions surrounding the actual scope of ineligible voters and their rates of participation can only be answered when federal offices share information,” said Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
In addition to Mr. Pence and Mr. Kobach, four current or former secretaries of state have been appointed: Democrats from New Hampshire and Maine, and Republicans from Indiana and Ohio.
The commission also will have one of the members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. A half-dozen other members are still to be named, though Mr. Kobach said the endeavor will be bipartisan.“I’m keeping an open mind, and I think all members of the commission will have an open mind. The charge of the commission is to go out and collect the facts and go where the facts lead us,” he said.
Hans van Spakovsky co-wrote a book about vote fraud, ”Who’s counting? How [...]]]>
Hans van Spakovsky co-wrote a book about vote fraud, ”Who’s counting? How fraudsters and bureaucrats put your vote at risk” and he recently explained details of the issue on Fox News.
Van Spakovsky mentioned the necessity to institute voter ID because US voting is based upon an honor system and that is not satisfactory. The public continues to support voter ID as a common sense requirement even though liberals complain that it is racist and black people couldn’t possibly manage to have proper identification. A Gallup poll from August found that 80 percent of Americans support voter ID laws.
]]>PAUL GIGOT: A vote recount got underway in Wisconsin Thursday, part of a push initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein that includes Michigan and Pennsylvania as well it claims of voting irregularities in these battleground states. President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter to blast the recount effort as a scam while alleging serious voter fraud in Virginia New Hampshire and California tweeting last Sunday quote “In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also co-author of the book “Who’s counting? How fraudsters and bureaucrats put your vote at risk.” So welcome to the program. Let’s start with the recount: is there any evidence of enough voter fraud in these states to overturn the election outcome?
HANS VAN SPOKOVSKY: Well remember, Jill Stein is not claiming voter fraud; she’s claiming hacking of the voting machines. She has absolutely no evidence of any kind to do that and in fact the way that those machines work, they are not tied into a central computer system, they are not networked, that is, the machines for example that scan ballots. So that the ability of hackers to get into is just about nil. This is a complete and total waste of time by Jill Stein.
GIGOT: Just to just to take her suggestion of a hacking seriously for a second, what would a hacker have to do in our decentralized electoral system to be able to influence the outcome of the result? How would they have penetrated so many different sites?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: They could for example — most electronic voting machines again — they’re not networked, so you’d have to get physical access to each electronic voting machine. Similarly in precincts that use paper ballots, the kind that are optically scanned by a computer, you’s have to get somehow physical access to the computer scanner and that is almost impossible. So the chances of this being hacked, it’s just about nil.
GIGOT: Okay, so just in a normal recount, have you ever seen a recount that overturned more than 10,000 votes in any kind of election?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: No, look, in the last two decades there have been a little more than two dozen statewide recounts; only in three of those was the race overturned. One of those was the Coleman-Franken race in 2008 in Minnesota. In every single case the margin of victory was less than a thousand votes. You simply are not going to get a bigger movement than that, even in a statewide recount,
GIGOT: Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the election, what do you make of his claim that they were they were up to millions of fraudulent voters?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: I would say he’s more right than his critics. We’d actually don’t know the answer to that, and the problem is is that our whole voter registration process is pretty much based on an honor system. I will tell you, we know for certain that non-citizens are illegally registering and voting. There have been cases all across the country and people being prosecuted for that, but there’s no systematic way of verifying citizenship. A number of surveys have looked at this, and non-US citizens themselves admit that they are registered to vote. It could be anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of non-citizens being registered.
GIGOT: If you’re an illegal immigrant here, you can go out and get a fake ID, fake social security card, fake driver’s license and then walk in and register to vote. Even with those fake documents, nobody’s going to check those, as you say it’s the honor system. So that’s the basis for the ability of people to register even if they’re not citizens, correct?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: Yes but also non-citizens who are here legally, many of them go and get driver’s licenses and they are asked whether they want to register to vote, and they’re allowed to register to vote. A case in Virginia just before the election — more than a thousand non-citizens were found registered in just eight counties in the state, all of them here legally but illegally registered, and many of them had voted in prior elections.
GIGOT: Okay but there’s a question of magnitude here. Do we have any sense of what that magnitude is? I mean you mention anecdotes, and anecdotes are worth mentioning, but statistically we really don’t know how many people might be fraudulent voters, do we?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: Here again, we have to get look at the surveys. Based on the surveys it could be anywhere from two percent to over six percent of non-citizens voting in elections which could be anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to over a million.
GIGOT: What should states do to limit this kind of voter fraud?
VAN SPOKOVSKY: Every state should have a law like Kansas that says when you register to vote you have to provide proof of citizenship and frankly the Trump administration needs to start a new project whereby the Department of Homeland Security starts checking state voter registration lists to verify citizenship of people who are registered to vote.
GIGOT: But this is typically done on a state basis, this is not something that you would do nationally in terms of voter ID laws.
VAN SPOKOVSKY: That’s right, but states have had problems with the Obama administration because the Obama administration has tried to stop all verification of citizenship on voter registration lists.
GIGOT: Okay, Hans von Spakovsky, thanks for being with us.
Below, Border Patrol agents welcome illegal aliens into [...]]]>
Below, Border Patrol agents welcome illegal aliens into Arizona rather than obstruct them.
The redefinition project is even measurable: A Google News search for Central American illegal immigrants done on January 11 gets 151,000 items; in comparison, a Google News search for Central American refugees generates a stunningly higher 1.23 million results. The mainstream media is so well trained!
Following is a recent example of category rebranding, from the mouth of a top anti-sovereignty anarchist, Rep. Luis Gutierrez:
After immigration raids, Latino leaders ask Obama to show ‘moral leadership’, Washington Post, January 9, 2016
WASHINGTON — Latino advocates and leaders rallied outside the White House Friday morning to demand that President Obama stop a new policy of rounding up and deporting families who entered the United States illegally after fleeing poverty and violence in Central America.
Amid rising concern among Democrats in Congress over the raids that began last week with 121 women and children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in three states, the group asked that Obama show “moral leadership” and grant temporary protected status to the families, similar to what many Central American war refugees were given in the 1990s. “We have a refugee crisis, not an immigration problem,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, who said he was gathering support in Congress for a letter to the president asking him to stop the raids.
The message seems to be if Germany can have open borders for all or most of Syria (population 23 million), certainly substantially larger United States can absorb much of Central America (around 43 million persons).
But welcoming unscreened millions is admitting not only the unfortunate poor but also the violent gangsters who are propelling many to leave the region. Certainly diverse gangsters recognize the better crime opportunities that a wealthier nation offers and come also. But why relocate Central America’s pathology here? Obama’s open doors invite the entire package.
Central American nations have some of the highest murder rates on earth:
Following are O’Reilly’s remarks in video and text about illegal aliens being transformed into “refugees.”
]]>Talking Points Memo: Here Come the Refugees, January 11, 2016
The worst thing that could happen to the left has happened in Germany.
Hundreds of young male refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are under suspicion for molesting hundreds of women.
The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel is under enormous pressure.
You’ll remember Ms. Merkel was the force behind Germany accepting more than one million refugees.
And many on the American left would like to do that here, as well.
In fact there is a campaign underway right now to re-brand illegal immigrants as economic refugees.
According to the polls, Americans do not want amnesty for illegal aliens, but accepting refugees sounds a lot better, doesn’t it?
Tomorrow in the State of the Union address the president will have a Syrian refugee sitting with Mrs. Obama, a message to be sure.
Now the sad truth is oppression is rampant throughout the world.
In the face of that the Democratic Party has basically become an open border organization.
They oppose a border fence.
They support amnesty for millions of illegal aliens already here.
They support sanctuary cities that harbor foreigners who violate American law.
And they oppose Kate’s Law, which would punish illegal alien felons who defy deportation.
That’s a pretty damning resume to most clear-thinking folks.
In the past three years women trying to illegally enter America through the southern border has more than doubled to about 120,000 apprehensions.
Unaccompanied children apprehended has also more than doubled almost to 40,000 in 2015.
And the left is labeling these poor people refugees.
If you live in Central America, chances are you are economically deprived.
According to a survey by Gallup, median income in America is about $44,000.
In Guatemala it’s $4,500.
In El Salvador, $4,800.
In Honduras, $4,800.
In Nicaragua, $6,500.
That’s the median income, half of all people down there take in less than that.
So you can see potential economic refugees are legion.
And then there’s the violence.
In the USA, the homicide rate is 4.5 people for every 100,000.
In El Salvador, it is 69 people for every 100,000.
In Honduras, 66 people.
Much of the violence is generated by drug gangs who poison their own people and kill at will.
By the way, Sean Penn not real upset about these drug gangs. We’ll get to that in our next segment.
So summing up, here come the refugees, plenty of them.
There are 16 million people in Guatemala.
Eight million in Honduras
Six million each in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
So you can see where this is going.
Finally, if you believe in Judeo-Christian philosophy, you must feel sorry for the common person in Central America.
Having spent some time down there, I can tell you the poverty is horrific.
But I can also say that America cannot accept millions of refugees from all over the world.
We are just about tapped out now with the debt approaching $20 trillion.
We should do what we can, but we must protect our country in the process.
And that’s the memo.
For example, in 2011 illegal aliens received $4.2 billion in tax “refunds” although they had paid nothing into the system.
A 2012 report from the local TV station WTHR in Indiana described stories of aliens who claimed a dozen kids or more to benefit from the Additional Child Tax Credit to gain $1000 per non-existent kid: Tax Loophole Costs Billions. The video version is infuriating. Part Two is here.
The ever curious Byron York wrote about the EITC ripoff recently and discuss the problem on Fox News Friday morning.
It’s funny that nobody ever questions the wisdom of the EITC program, which is supported by politicians across the spectrum. If working people need extra cash from the government to get by, then something may be structurally wrong with the economy — perhaps excess labor in the form of immigrant and illegal alien workers.
]]>Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants, Washington Examiner, By Byron York, December 11, 2014
President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.
As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.
The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.
Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud.
According to the inspector general, the IRS paid out $63 billion in EITC benefits in 2013. Of that, 24 percent, or about $15 billion, was given improperly to people not qualified to receive it. That improper payment rate has been enough to qualify the EITC as a “high risk” program for years.
The IRS paid out $26.6 billion in ACTC credits in 2013. The inspector general reports the child credit improper payment rate for that year was somewhere between 25.2 percent and 30.5 percent — worse than the EITC.
Considering that federal law defines a program as having “significant improper payments” when such payments exceed 2.5 percent of all the money the program sends out, those are pretty terrible numbers.
Even as the problems with the Earned Income Tax Credit were obvious, the IRS has for years insisted that the child credit was a program with a “low risk” of fraud. The inspector general concluded that the IRS has known all along that the “low risk” designation was phony. “The IRS’s rating of the ACTC as low risk for significant improper payments is contrary to its own enforcement data,” the report noted.
Both Congress and the president have ordered the IRS to crack down on improper payments. But the agency doesn’t appear to be trying very hard. “The estimated EITC improper payment rate has remained relatively unchanged since fiscal year 2003 (the first year the IRS was required to report estimates of these payments to Congress), and the amount of EITC claims paid in error has grown,” writes the inspector general.
The report estimates there has been somewhere between $124 billion and $148 billion in improper EITC payments in the last decade. That’s more than the federal government pays for, say, veterans’ benefits, or the justice system, or agriculture, or transportation in any given year. And it is all wasted.
Top IRS management has disputed most of the inspector general’s conclusions and rejected most of his suggestions. So don’t expect much to change. But if nothing changes, the problem will get worse. “Existing compliance processes will not reduce the billions of dollars in improper Earned Income Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit payments,” the inspector general concludes.
And now the programs — and the fraud — are likely to grow with the president’s immigration order. It’s something Obama did not take time to explain when he made the announcement.
In fact, the president obscured what is happening by telling the covered illegal immigrants that if “you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to stay. …” In fact, for many of those affected, “willing to pay your fair share of taxes” actually means “willing to accept an assistance check from the government.”
If past practice is any guide, the Obama administration will likely start an aggressive, multilingual campaign to encourage illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action to apply for as many benefits as possible. And if not all of them are actually eligible to receive the taxpayers’ money? Well, no one will be checking that too closely.
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The recent guilty verdict in the trial of a convicted terrorist bomber for immigration fraud is another reminder of how inept the feds are at barring the entrance of dangerous people into America. Numerous war criminals have been admitted to this country because of plain sloppy investigation of immigrants’ backgrounds by an unconcerned bureaucracy.
The case is hardly a confidence builder for the idea that the government could responsibly handle an amnesty for millions of lawbreaking foreigners that would still protect public safety.
In addition, the Obama administration has ordered eased immigration standards so that Syrians with limited terror ties could be admitted. The White House must think America has insufficient jihadist diversity.
Anyway, today’s criminal terrorist alien is Rasmieh Odeh (pictured), a Palestinian who was imprisoned in Israel for a bombing that killed two students in 1969. Israel released her from incarceration in a prisoner swap with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, not because she was thought to be rehabilitated. Odeh was convicted in Detroit for omitting her criminal terrorist record when she applied to enter the United States.
Despite the fact she was a known terrorist, Odeh got a job with the federal government that allowed her access to the personal information of Americans: Convicted Terrorist Bomber? No Problem Getting ObamaCare Navigator Job.
Greta van Susteren was outraged by the case and highlighted it on her Fox show in February:
Throughout the case, the pro-jihad Palestinians of Michigan showed up to protest her incarceration, making bogus excuses for her undeniable criminal act of not ticking the terrorist box on her application for immigration. The alleged victimhood of Odeh was played up in the news article by Niraj Warikoo:
]]>Palestinian woman guilty of lying on citizenship papers, Detroit Free Press, November 10, 2014
A Detroit jury today found a Palestinian immigrant guilty of not disclosing that she had been convicted in a 1969 Israel bombing when she was applying for U.S. citizenship.
Rasmieh Odeh, 67, was accused by prosecutors of being a terrorist who killed Israelis in 1969 and then lied about it when trying to become a U.S. citizen. Odeh used to live in Michigan and is now in Chicago, where she works for the Arab American Action Network. She was not charged with any terrorism crime, but with immigration violations.
Odeh could face up to ten years in prison for her conviction and be stripped of her U.S. citizenship. After the verdict, Odeh said outside the courthouse: “We have to bring the justice together..I’m strong & I ask all of you to be strong…We are the strongest people, not the government…We are stronger.”
In a statement, her supporters called today’s verdict “a travesty of justice,” saying that Odeh did “not get a full and fair trial.”
The Rasmea Defense Committee claimed that “the immigration charge was nothing but a pretext to attack this icon of the Palestine liberation movement.”
They said Odeh’s attorneys will appeal the decision.
But a jury agreed today with federal prosecutors who said that Odeh checked “no” on immigration and citizenship forms she filled out in Detroit when asked whether she had ever been convicted of a crime. Odeh concedes that she was convicted in Israel, but maintains that she was forced to confess after being tortured. She also claims that she thought the questions on the forms referred only to convictions in the U.S.
The trial has drawn national attention, with up to 100 protesters rallying outside the courthouse every day last week and today. Rallies also have been held in Florida, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Odeh, associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, is being supported by a network of pro-Palestinian groups, which have launched online campaigns on Twitter and Facebook to bring attention to her cause. The group that she works for is part of the Dearborn-based National Network for Arab American Communities.
At the request of prosecutors, the jury was partially sequestered, a move only done in high-profile cases.
The case was contentious, with a previous judge, Paul Borman, recusing himself after Odeh’s attorney said Borman had a financial connection to the case because of pro-Israel donations; Borman said the 1969 bombing targets included a supermarket to which Borman’s family was financially tied. After serving time in prison in Israel, Odeh was released in a prisoner exchange.
Odeh immigrated to the U.S. in 1995, coming to Michigan to help take care of her father, who had cancer. She also had a brother in Michigan who owned a restaurant. She became a U.S. citizen in 2004. On her immigration forms in 1995 and later on her application forms for citizenship, she said she was never convicted of a crime.
Prosecutors call her a terrorist who used deception to enter the U.S. They hoped that a guilty verdict will send a message that terrorists can’t seek to hide in the U.S.
“The United States will never be a safe haven for individuals seeking to distance themselves from their pasts,” William Hayes, deputy special agent in charge at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement last year in October at the time of Odeh’s arrest.
“An individual convicted of a terrorist bombing would not be admitted to the United States if that information was known at the time of arrival,” Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in the statement last year. “Upon discovery that someone convicted of a terrorist attack is in the United States illegally, we will seek to use our criminal justice system to remove that individual.”
Before the trial, defense attorneys for Odeh said in court filings that she had been sexually assaulted and tortured by Israelis while in prison, resulting in a forced confession. But Judge Drain did not allow those claims to be mentioned during the trial, disappointing her supporters, who were planning to make that a key part of their case.
A busload of protesters from Chicago drove to Detroit last week and for previous court hearings. Nadine Naber, associate professor at the University of Illinois, was in Detroit to support Odeh.
“This was a politically motivated case,” Naber said Friday. “We weren’t allowed to talk about how she was sexually tortured.”
Another likely visa mill was Oakland’s Oikos University, the site of a mass shooting in 2012 where an unhappy immigrant murdered seven. The school offered studies to an F-1 visa clientele in bible studies, music and vocational nursing.
One of the more notorious visa mills has been Pleasanton’s Tri-Valley University. The President of TVU was a Chinese woman, Susan Xiao-Ping Su (pictured), who made over $5 million during her tenure, quite a trick when you consider the school was founded in 2008 and shut down by the authorities in 2011. Authorities may have figured out the school was a scam when students were “scattered across the country” in convenience store jobs and such (‘Sham’ University Case One of Biggest, Official Says, Pleasanton Patch, May 4, 2011).
For some diversity fun, you can see the sentencing story explained in a foreign language, perhaps Telegu, at this link, showing interest in TVU’s fate extends far beyond English-speaking California.
]]>Bay Area Woman Gets 16 Years For Running Fake University, San Francisco CBS, November 4, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A San Francisco Bay Area woman was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison for running what prosecutors said was a sham university that served as a front for an immigration scam.
Susan Xiao-Ping Su, founder and president of the phony Tri-Valley University in Pleasanton, was accused of charging hundreds of foreigners, mostly Indian nationals, tuition and other payments for visa-related documents that allowed them to live and work in the U.S. while she purported that they were here legally to study. She made more than $5.6 million and used the money to buy commercial real estate, a Mercedes Benz and multiple homes, including one at a golf club, federal prosecutors said Monday.
U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar sentenced Su, 44, on Friday after she was convicted in March of visa fraud and other charges. She was also ordered to forfeit $5.6 million and pay more than $900,000 in restitution to two companies that processed payments from students, authorities said. Su’s attorney, John Jordan, said he has filed a notice of appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Student visas are intended to give people from around the world a chance to come to this country to enrich themselves with the vast learning opportunities available here,” Tatum King, acting special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations, San Francisco, said in a statement. “But in this case, the defendant was interested in a different kind of enrichment, her own.”
Most of the students appeared to know they were taking part in a fraudulent scheme, said Mitchell Rose, a supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations in San Francisco.
They received visa-related documents in exchange for about $2,700 a semester, Rose said.
Many of them left the country on their own after the school was raided in 2011, while others applied to regain their student status.
The Tri-Valley case is not unique in the Bay Area. Jerry Wang, the chief executive officer of Herguan University and the University of East-West Medicine in Sunnyvale, is also facing visa fraud charges in connection with what authorities say is a similar scheme. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial next month.
In the Tri-Valley case, employees testified that the school had no graduation and admission requirements, and that Su, of Pleasanton, instructed her staff to fabricate transcripts and other documents. Some professors said Su used their names, though they did not teach at Tri-Valley or have any connection to the school.
Tri-Valley described itself as a “Christian higher education institution” that provided higher education in engineering, business and ministry, according to court documents. But Rose said investigators found purported classes were non-existent or had technical problems. Attendance at legitimate online classes was sparse, but the students obtained high grades nonetheless.